Pressure sores or wounds are injuries to the skin and/or the tissues under the skin. These types of wounds commonly form on persons confined to a chair or bed. Pressure wounds can range from red areas on the surface of the skin to severe tissue damage that goes deep into muscle and bone. Constant pressure on an area of skin reduces blood supply to that area and, over time, can break down the skin and form an open sore. Pressure wounds usually form on the skin over bony areas where there is little tissue between the bone and the skin. A common place for pressure wounds to form is in the lower back above the sacrum and coccyx. Treatment of these “sacral” wounds includes keeping the wound clean and covered with wound dressings.
A problem with current sacral wound dressings is that they do not adequately protect a sacral wound from contaminants, such as urine and feces. This is primarily due to insufficient sealing of the wound dressing to the skin around the wound. This occurs because of the anatomy of the sacrococcygeal body region. Specifically, the buttocks are separated by a gluteal cleft, sometimes also referred to as a gluteal fold or gluteal crease, which terminates at its superior end in the sacrococcygeal region. Sacral wounds frequently extend into the gluteal cleft. To adequately protect a sacral wound, a wound dressing should cover the superior end of the gluteal cleft and be pushed into the gluteal cleft to adhere to the skin, thereby creating a sealed protective zone around the sacral wound. However, prior art sacral wound dressings are not adequately designed for the anatomy of the sacrococcygeal region and, as a result, they tend to detach from the gluteal cleft as a result of patient movement, thus allowing contaminants to invade the protective zone and interfere with healing of the sacral wound.
Accordingly, what is needed, and is not found in the prior art, is a sacral wound dressing that will properly conform to the anatomy of the sacrococcygeal region of the body to provide a proper seal around a sacral wound and thereby prevent contaminants from invading the area protected by the dressing.